High-speed digital communications may benefit from forward error correction techniques, wherein data blocks to be transmitted may be redundantly encoded. On the receiving end, iterative and/or soft decoding techniques may be used to extract received data blocks from the received signal-plus-noise, thereby decreasing the probability of error in the received blocks. Although these techniques may result in a satisfactory percentage of recovered data blocks, the amount of time required to iteratively converge to correctly decoding some blocks may exceed the available inter-block time window. Using processing resources sufficient to assure decoder convergence to acceptable bit error rates may be uneconomical, especially at high block throughput rates.